Visitors By Air Plane to Fripp Island SC

This Article was written By Page Miller

Visitors By Air Plane to Fripp Island SC

John Lee

With the departure of the beach patrol, the abandoned barracks provided a shelter for outings to Fripp. There was kind of squatters rights system practice, whereby whoever found the barracks empty use them for lodging. Many happy and successful camping and fishing trips, Pierre McGowan wrote. We made through the use of these facilities. In addition, the end of World War II meant Hunting Island could once again become a state park with a public road, to its boat ramp. This made Fripp Island, located just one third of a mile across to the Fripp inlet, easy and assessable by boat. The combination of these, and access and the possibility of housing instead of tents increase the number of people who visit Fripp Island, particularly fishman, who considers Fripp, a paradise.

Visitors occasionally came to Fripp by private plane. William Hardee McLeod, who was related to the McLeod truck farming family of Seabrook and not the McLeod’s of the North Carolina lumber company, recalled boyhood memories of Fripp. McLeod’s father and jack Pollizer, who had been trail gunner during World War II, would fly to Fripp from a private airstrip located on what is now the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort. The plane would land on the beach at low tide just in time for the first hours of the incoming tide, the best time for fishing in the surf for bass. On at least one occasion, McLeod recalled, there was a hair rising departure as the high tide left little beach for getting airborne.